Voting Factors

I, too, decided to go home during reading days, and when I got back to Salem I started to think about voter rationality. Salem is a small independent city in Southwest Virginia with about 25,000 people. As such, the whole community is pretty intimate - I can't go anywhere without seeing someone I know or having some random person text my parents that they saw me out. Salem is right next to Roanoke City, which is a bit bigger with around 100,000 people. Given the population differences and variance in community feel/climate, I started to wonder if the voter turnout rates would be different between the two localities.

In our voter rationality model, we concluded that it was rational to vote if the expected marginal benefit of voting + some variable D, that could represent additional factors such as lessening social pressure and expressive voting, was greater than the marginal cost of voting. My initial hypothesis was that in Salem, the value of D would be higher given the increased social pressure based on the intimacy of the community. Additionally, I figured that expressive voting would be more valuable in Salem than in Roanoke given the importance of social capital in a small town. Therefore, assuming that the expected marginal benefit from voting for the average Salem citizen is roughly similar to the expected marginal benefit from voting for the average Roanoke citizen (economically/geographically similar with same very small p of being deciding vote) and the marginal costs of voting are similar (proximity to polls, time to vote), then I would expect voter turnout to be higher in Salem than in Roanoke as on average the expected marginal benefit from voting + D would be greater in Salem. Voter turnout data for the 2016 presidential election supported my hypothesis as the voter turnout in Salem was 71.55% of registered voters versus 62.7% of registered voters in Roanoke City. However, it is possible that voter turnout in Salem is higher also because of lower marginal costs of voting, meaning it may be the combination of lower marginal costs and higher values of D that explain the difference in turnout.